A New Economic Civil Rights Struggle: Disappearing Data 

By Eric Morrissette Photos: YouTube Screenshots|Wikimedia Commons If discrimination cannot be measured, it becomes far harder to challenge — legally, politically, or publicly. That is why the dismantling of federal economic data collection may become one of the most consequential civil-rights reversals of this era.  For generations, America’s civil-rights framework has operated on a simple premise: inequality can be measured. Mortgage lending disparities. Redlining. Employment discrimination. Unequal access to capital. None of these were exposed because institutions voluntarily admitted wrongdoing. They were uncovered because data was collected, analyzed, and tested in courts.  The Civil Rights Act does not require proving that someone is personally racist. It requires proving that a policy creates a measurable, disproportionate harm to one group — a legal standard known as “disparate impact.” Without data, that standard becomes extraordinarily hard to meet.  This administration has moved aggressively to dismantle the federal data infrastructure that makes economic disparity visible. It proposed eliminating the EEO-1 form: the only federally collected source of business-level data on employment by race, ethnicity, sex, and job category. This would strip the EEOC of its primary tool for identifying discriminatory hiring patterns. An executive order moved to eliminate the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) entirely. This agency, which I led as Acting Under Secretary, was designed by law to function as the country’s clearinghouse for minority business data, and in a single year facilitated $1.5 billion in capital access for minority-owned firms. Perhaps most notably, President Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to roll back the use of the disparate impact standard “in all contexts to the maximum degree” — across housing, lending, employment, education, and healthcare.   This represents a strategy, not a series of coincidences.  The May 1st rollback of Section 1071 of the Dodd-Frank Act follows this pattern. This provision required financial institutions to collect and report data on small-business loan applications — specifically tracking the race, ethnicity, and gender of business owners to ensure equitable access to credit. By measuring credit deserts and lending disparities, it created public accountability designed to detect and prevent discriminatory lending against minority-owned and women-owned businesses. House Financial Services Ranking Member Maxine Waters put it plainly: the updated rule “guts the very data small businesses and the public need,” not by streamlining compliance, but by shielding bad actors and limiting transparency.  This data is critical to solving the problem of disparity. I saw this dynamic when running the MBDA. Capital access for socially and economically disadvantaged groups was a binding constraint to their growth and success. Reliable data showed that, when everything else was held equal, women and people of color were charged more for capital and received less of it. The solution to that problem is not suppressing its evidence.  In effect, eliminating the data can functionally eliminate the claim.  According to 2024 Federal Reserve data, 39% of Black-owned business loan applications result in denial — more than double the rate for white-owned businesses, and the highest rejection rate of any demographic group tracked. If race data is no longer collected in meaningful detail, proving that disparity is the product of discrimination requiring enforcement action becomes exponentially harder. That is why the scale of the Section 1071 rollback carries far-reaching implications. It changes the ground on which future economic civil rights cases will stand or fall.  This is happening at the precise moment courts, following a series of conservative rulings, are demanding more rigorous evidence of disparate impact to justify policy intervention. I experienced this firsthand when a federal court struck down a portion of the MBDA Act in Nuziard v. Minority Business Development Agency, citing insufficient evidence of disparate impact —principles amplified after the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that ended race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions.  The people expediting disparity are simultaneously being told to prove more and stripped of the tools to prove anything.  Data does not predetermine outcomes. It does not guarantee discrimination claims succeed. It just allows society to see. And increasingly, that visibility itself appears to be what is under attack.  We have likely all had this nagging question at some point — is it just me? When we suspect something that feels like more than coincidence. The ability to look critically at the data around us helps maintain our bearings and our sanity. You are not losing it. This thing is happening to you. With that